2: The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal

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1. 00:00:00 I did make a big mistake though Mike.
2. 00:00:02 What's that?
3. 00:00:03 I decided that based off of GTD,
4. 00:00:07 I was going to consolidate a bunch of inboxes into my email.
5. 00:00:13 That was fun.
6. 00:00:16 How'd that turn out?
7. 00:00:18 Well, I end up with about 300 emails in a day,
8. 00:00:21 apparently, and it's fun.
9. 00:00:26 You have to set aside at least an hour to get through it all.
10. 00:00:29 But that means that I'm not checking Twitter,
11. 00:00:34 I'm not checking a bunch of this other stuff repeatedly throughout the day.
12. 00:00:38 So it ends up as a good thing.
13. 00:00:41 Nice.
14. 00:00:42 Any massive changes to your GTD system after rereading the book last time?
15. 00:00:48 Not any major changes, but what reading the book did for me
16. 00:00:52 is it made me realize that I had fallen off the wagon to a certain degree.
17. 00:00:57 So I've been trying to do a much better job of making sure that everything,
18. 00:01:01 absolutely everything is captured,
19. 00:01:03 and then I'm a little bit more consistent and thorough with my reviews.
20. 00:01:07 So I'd say in the last couple of weeks,
21. 00:01:10 those have been taken up a notch,
22. 00:01:12 but I definitely still have some room for improvement.
23. 00:01:16 Yeah, that sounds...
24. 00:01:17 I had to do a big, like, brain dump,
25. 00:01:21 I guess, the mind sweep process.
26. 00:01:23 I had to do a bunch of that.
27. 00:01:24 And one of the interesting pieces I had to incorporate
28. 00:01:29 was making sure I did that on a regular basis,
29. 00:01:31 just because it was...
30. 00:01:33 Like you're saying, it's too easy to just get on the train of...
31. 00:01:36 collect things as they come,
32. 00:01:38 and then you're putting it into the system and running with it from there,
33. 00:01:41 but then you always have to make sure you take a step back and say,
34. 00:01:44 "Okay, what's on my mind that I'm not getting out of my mind right now?
35. 00:01:49 And what do I do about it?"
36. 00:01:51 That was kind of my difficulty and the thing I wasn't doing,
37. 00:01:55 so that would be...
38. 00:01:56 I don't know, that's been a big step for me,
39. 00:01:58 is to try to get that back on track.
40. 00:02:00 Yep, as they say in movie "Zoolander,"
41. 00:02:04 "What do we do when we fall off the horse?"
42. 00:02:07 "We get back on!"
43. 00:02:08 And to me, the book that we go through,
44. 00:02:15 that we just finished reading,
45. 00:02:17 that we're gonna go through today,
46. 00:02:18 I thought this was a good next step
47. 00:02:23 after getting things done,
48. 00:02:25 because getting things done,
49. 00:02:26 for me, was a lot about remembering the things I need to do,
50. 00:02:31 freeing up that mental ram and accomplishing things.
51. 00:02:34 And today's book, "The Willpower Instinct,"
52. 00:02:38 by Kelly McGonagall,
53. 00:02:39 it kind of helps me go to that next step and focus on,
54. 00:02:43 "Okay, how do I have the self-control to do the things that are on those lists?"
55. 00:02:48 If that makes sense, how do I actually make sure that I'm doing the stuff that I've set
56. 00:02:52 aside from the getting things done system?
57. 00:02:56 I've been calling it TWP.
58. 00:02:59 How do I actually accomplish that and make sure I'm on task?
59. 00:03:07 Does that make sense?
60. 00:03:08 Does that, I don't know, they were interestingly connected to me.
61. 00:03:12 They definitely, "The Willpower Instinct," to me, I saw immediate gains when I read this,
62. 00:03:19 and part of it was the application of actually following through
63. 00:03:24 and doing my reviews and making sure that I'm capturing everything the way that I'm supposed to.
64. 00:03:28 Like we talked about when we did getting things done,
65. 00:03:30 because I don't know, reading this book was kind of like a little bit of a pep rally.
66. 00:03:35 It's like, "Yeah, you can do it sort of a thing," and you get done reading a chapter,
67. 00:03:38 and you're like, "Oh, this isn't that hard."
68. 00:03:40 Like, "I understand how this works now. I can put this into action in my own life."
69. 00:03:44 Yes, it's one of those things. I really wanted each chapter to be
70. 00:03:50 consolidated down into a paragraph so that I could just read one of those every day,
71. 00:03:56 because every time I put the book down, I was like, "Okay, I'm gonna go take on the world now,"
72. 00:04:00 because I feel like I could accomplish a whole lot.
73. 00:04:03 But before we get too far here, so "The Willpower Instinct,"
74. 00:04:07 it's by Kelly McGonagall, the violin on this, how self-control works,
75. 00:04:13 why it matters, and what you can do to get more of it.
76. 00:04:15 And to be honest, Mike, whenever I picked up the book, so I ordered it from Amazon,
77. 00:04:22 you know, the classy thing to do. And I didn't really know what,
78. 00:04:27 like, I didn't even know what that violin was until I showed up at the door.
79. 00:04:30 So I picked it up. I was reading the back of it, and I realized
80. 00:04:36 that I had listened, not listened, but I had watched Kelly McGonagall has done a TED talk,
81. 00:04:41 and it's about stress, which she doesn't talk about a whole lot here in "The Willpower Instinct,"
82. 00:04:49 but she does have a lot of research that she's done on stress, and I think that's kind of her
83. 00:04:55 correlation of stress kind of combats willpower or self-control. And she's really good about
84. 00:05:02 explaining how do you deal with that. And this, I think, was one of her first steps,
85. 00:05:07 like it's the step before you get into the stress side of things. And to be honest,
86. 00:05:12 reading the first, like, the introduction of this made me want to be done with it right away,
87. 00:05:17 not because I understood everything she was going to go through, but I wanted the tips and tricks,
88. 00:05:24 like, already figured out. It's like, okay, how many of these things am I failing at, and
89. 00:05:30 how many things am I thinking that I'm really good at, and I'm good at accomplishing, and I'm good at,
90. 00:05:35 I guess, controlling my mind to focus on the right thing, and yet I'm not
91. 00:05:40 reaching that. I kind of had the same thing when I read this book right away when I dove in,
92. 00:05:48 she gives you some quick wins. So from a marketing perspective, she did a great job
93. 00:05:53 using the first chapter. She's, oh, you can do this, and you can do that, and you can do this
94. 00:05:57 to increase willpower, and then she gets into really the why behind willpower, and how self-control
95. 00:06:02 works and stuff like that, further on in the book. But one of the things that she highlighted
96. 00:06:08 right at the beginning, which I thought was really interesting, was that the average person
97. 00:06:12 thinks that they make about 14 food-related decisions a day, when in reality, it was like 227.
98. 00:06:21 I know, I know. I ended up, so I do this whole book index thing on the back, and there are so
99. 00:06:28 many of those. I had this little fun tidbits thing that I was highlighting and marking up tons of
100. 00:06:35 those things, and there was so many of them. How many things do we, like, for example, one of them
101. 00:06:43 was that dieting tends to help most people increase weight. You end up gaining weight from most
102. 00:06:51 diets. It's like, what? Yeah, and the way that she explains it, it's kind of like, well, yeah,
103. 00:06:57 I can totally see why that would happen. Who in their right mind would try to actually embark on
104. 00:07:02 this diet, but a lot of people do because they don't understand the process. So that was really
105. 00:07:08 helpful for me, understanding the process, and really understanding the three different types
106. 00:07:13 of willpower. She defined them as, "I will, I won't, and I want." And if you do the book the way you're
107. 00:07:22 supposed to, and I didn't do it this way, you probably didn't either because of the time frame
108. 00:07:27 that we read it, but she teaches this stuff as a class at Stanford. So it's broken down into,
109. 00:07:34 you choose your willpower challenge at the beginning, and then you go through it as like a series of
110. 00:07:38 10 different lessons. And so she talks about how your willpower challenge at the beginning,
111. 00:07:45 if it falls into one of these categories, it's not going to be as effective, but she doesn't tell
112. 00:07:49 you that. So you get to like chapter four or five. So she kind of reveals stuff as she goes, but
113. 00:07:53 it was really interesting to see why some things will work if we view it through, "I will versus,
114. 00:07:59 I won't," and vice versa. And I think that is really the trick for a lot of people who struggle
115. 00:08:05 with this stuff is they want to go to the gym consistently, but it's just in the way that they're
116. 00:08:12 framing that. Just looking at it from a different angle or a different perspective,
117. 00:08:17 the exact same thing, that might be enough to help you follow through and actually take action on that.
118. 00:08:22 Right. And there was a lot of tips that she goes through on each of those. And
119. 00:08:30 the one piece of this whole thing that stood out to me was that your brain actually can,
120. 00:08:36 because she does a ton of the studies, whereas last time we were talking about getting things
121. 00:08:41 done in that chapter on science and how it was rather lacking, I didn't dig into the studies on
122. 00:08:46 this one near as much as I did on that one simply because the first two that I looked at,
123. 00:08:53 they're rock solid. Kelly is really good about finding the really well-done studies, I guess.
124. 00:09:02 Every chapter is basically about that. She pulls together two or three, sometimes five studies,
125. 00:09:08 and then explains how they apply to your life. One of those was how you can physically grow
126. 00:09:18 a certain part of your brain, which was fascinating to me because I've never really thought about,
127. 00:09:23 like the example I think she gave was about memory. You remember those card games where you had the
128. 00:09:29 card's length face down and you had to flip one up and try to match the two of them,
129. 00:09:33 and you had to memorize where everything was at so that you could make those matches.
130. 00:09:37 She simply said that if you do that for about 10-15 minutes every day, you play that game every
131. 00:09:43 single day. The part of your brain that helps you work on memory physically does grow and get
132. 00:09:49 bigger and gets better and the connections are strengthened in your brain physically.
133. 00:09:55 Even simple things like self-control or in that case memory, you can physically work on those
134. 00:10:04 and make them bigger and make your brain better at those. That blew my mind a little bit.
135. 00:10:11 That means if I find ways to practice self-control, which she gives probably hundreds of tips on how
136. 00:10:20 to do that in here, if you can find ways to do that that work for you, then you can actually grow
137. 00:10:29 your brain in the self-control muscle. She literally makes that correlation of you can treat your
138. 00:10:35 brain like a physical muscle. We've heard that in the past. You hear those, hear people talk about
139. 00:10:40 your brain as a muscle, but I've never thought about it as actually physically growing whenever
140. 00:10:46 you do that. One of the things that she mentions that you can do is meditation, but the way that
141. 00:10:53 she framed that section, I thought was really interesting because she's used examples of people
142. 00:10:57 who thought that they were terrible at meditation, which I would fall into that category. I've tried
143. 00:11:04 it in the past and not been great at it, but I just assumed that it wasn't for me that I was
144. 00:11:11 doing something wrong. I cut out the practice of that, but she basically says that it's okay if you
145. 00:11:19 suck at it. The fact that you're doing it, even if you can't pay attention or you can't do it the
146. 00:11:24 way that you think you're supposed to do it, you catch your mind drifting and things like that,
147. 00:11:28 that's okay because the effectiveness of it isn't coming from you being able to focus on those things.
148. 00:11:33 It's just putting in those reps with your brain. Some of the things that she said meditation
149. 00:11:39 improves are like attention, focus, stress management, impulse control, self-awareness. One of the
150. 00:11:45 things kind of going out of order, sorry, but one of the things that I'm trying to do here is I have
151. 00:11:50 this app on my iPhone. It's called Meditation Studio. I'm trying to get back into it. It's got a whole
152. 00:11:57 bunch of guided meditations, which range anywhere from two minutes to I think there's so many,
153. 00:12:03 like as long as 20 minutes. I'm going to try and start doing these consistently and I'm hoping that
154. 00:12:10 I'm going to see the results that she says I'm going to see. I believe I will because like you said,
155. 00:12:15 this whole thing has so much research behind it. It can be overwhelming, but kind of like you,
156. 00:12:20 like when she would refer to a study, I recognize some of the names, like she mentions Ray Baumeister
157. 00:12:27 and stuff like that. But she does it often enough that when she does it, you're just like, yep,
158. 00:12:33 okay, you know what you're talking about. Let's get to the results. One of the things she mentioned
159. 00:12:39 at the beginning was that there was a study where people who are distracted are much more likely to
160. 00:12:44 give in to temptation. So the study itself was with students who were trying to remember a phone
161. 00:12:49 number. Do you remember this one? - Vaguely. - We're going on our Nettle Trigger.
162. 00:12:53 Yeah, so students who are trying to remember a phone number were 50% more likely to not have
163. 00:13:00 the willpower to choose fruit at the snack cart and give in and get chocolate cake instead.
164. 00:13:05 - Yeah. - Just because they're trying to remember a phone number, which going back to like the
165. 00:13:10 food related decisions that people make, like actually being 227 instead of the 14 that they think,
166. 00:13:15 that was a big thing for me was recognizing and I kind of knew this already, but it really
167. 00:13:21 reinforced it and made me aware of it again that I make a lot of decisions throughout the day
168. 00:13:28 that I maybe shouldn't be making and it's depleting my willpower. So how can I make sure that I
169. 00:13:37 conserve enough willpower for the things that really matter by pushing off or doing them earlier,
170. 00:13:43 whatever, like the other things that don't really matter, like what am I going to eat today?
171. 00:13:48 Not that that doesn't matter, but you get what I'm saying. Like for example, you have to choose
172. 00:13:53 what you're going to wear in the morning. Well, you could do that the night before when you're
173. 00:13:56 getting ready for bed. That's an easy win then and you don't have to make that decision when you first
174. 00:14:00 get up as an example. - Yeah. And I think that correlates to you hear of people like Steve Jobs,
175. 00:14:09 Mark Zuckerberg, who they wear the same thing every single day. Like they just have this wardrobe
176. 00:14:14 that they always wear. I think there's some of that here with that decision fatigue
177. 00:14:19 process that we hear about and that's that, you know, and the concept there is that you
178. 00:14:25 limit the number of decisions you need to make on some of the mundane things so that you can focus
179. 00:14:31 your mind on making the decisions on the more important or the bigger ideas. And I think this is
180. 00:14:37 partially why because you need to push off some of those willpower draining functions that when
181. 00:14:46 you're working your self-control, like you're trying to do too much with it because the more
182. 00:14:50 that you work that muscle, it's just like, you know, any part of your like if you're working your
183. 00:14:55 legs or your arms, you're doing bench presses, you're eventually going to wear out. Well, it's
184. 00:14:59 the same thing with self-control is you're you're working that muscle and over time it does get
185. 00:15:05 tired and you can't keep going. I think about whenever we have our structures and our systems
186. 00:15:11 in place, the more that we try to say that we're going to we're going to get so much done today
187. 00:15:17 or as she's talking about, I'm going to get a ton of things done tomorrow. It's always the
188. 00:15:23 elusive tomorrow person who's going to do it. The more I can give to them, the more I'm pushing myself
189. 00:15:29 to do that. The less I'm able to accomplish today. And we tend to associate the things that the
190. 00:15:37 bigger grander things that we want to do. Like I'm going to accomplish 10 new podcasts today. Well,
191. 00:15:44 no, no, you're not. There's not even enough time to do that. You're not going to have the mental
192. 00:15:48 energy. You're not going to have the focus to do that. And if you think that you're going to do
193. 00:15:52 that tomorrow, you're really not because you're going to feel the same way tomorrow. And then
194. 00:15:57 it's the next day. And this is where the procrastination circle kicks in.
195. 00:16:00 Yeah, that part was really interesting. She basically said that we have a psychological
196. 00:16:07 tendency to predict the ideal scenario for the future. But in reality, that ideal scenario
197. 00:16:14 never really materializes exactly like that. And even though people knew that, they were more likely
198. 00:16:23 to commit more time or more resources to something in the future, because they still believe it at a
199. 00:16:32 cycle at a psychological level that they would be able to better handle their their time in the
200. 00:16:36 future. For example, like, if you were going to commit to a service project, you'd give
201. 00:16:40 X amount of time right now, maybe it's 15 minutes, but two weeks in the future, you'd be willing to
202. 00:16:45 give 30 minutes. And then she was digging into like, why is that that people think that in the
203. 00:16:51 future, they're going to be better stewards of everything. I thought that was really interesting,
204. 00:16:57 because she also talks about how the further we go into the future, the more we kind of double
205. 00:17:01 down on that on that effect, even though it can be proven that that's not not what usually happens.
206. 00:17:08 Right. You know, if you were to actually measure two weeks from now, how much time do you want to
207. 00:17:14 commit to this thing? It's actually less than the 15 minutes you have today. But even though you're
208. 00:17:19 armed with that data and you see the patterns playing out in your own life, you it's like you
209. 00:17:25 feel that you can beat that, even though that's ingrained in there, like you have enough. I don't
210. 00:17:32 know. It's not even really willpower. It's just like, I am going to overcome the laws of nature.
211. 00:17:37 And I'm going to do this differently. But it's just not being realistic with ourselves. So
212. 00:17:45 recognizing that that kind of stuff happens was really good for me, because I definitely see how
213. 00:17:50 I can I overcome it to stuff a lot of times, because I'm like, Oh yeah, I'll have an hour where I
214. 00:17:55 can squeeze in next week to do this thing. And then my kid has to go into the ER to get stitches,
215. 00:18:01 you know, or fill in the blank. It's always always something. But you would think that, you know,
216. 00:18:06 you learn from that stuff and you start to see the pattern, but we don't. We just always project
217. 00:18:11 the ideal, even though that's never what actually happens. Exactly. And I think this is kind of the
218. 00:18:16 the moral licensing piece that she was talking about. This is easily the one that I struggle with
219. 00:18:23 the most, I think, because I'm really good at saying that if I work really hard on something
220. 00:18:30 today, or say this morning, so this morning, I'm doing a ton of reviews and I'm doing a lot of
221. 00:18:36 writing and I'm accomplishing a lot. Well, then I go to lunch and I come back from lunch and
222. 00:18:41 because I feel like I had a highly productive morning, it's kind of giving me permission
223. 00:18:48 to do the easy goof off type of tasks in the afternoon or none at all. And that's what she's
224. 00:18:56 referring to with moral licensing. If I do good now, I can do bad later. And she correlates that
225. 00:19:01 again. She uses the example of food and smoking and drinking quite a bit. And I think that's partially
226. 00:19:08 because in her class, that's usually the the self control and the willpower challenges that
227. 00:19:15 people take on as those type of those difficulties that people deal with. And for me, it's usually a
228. 00:19:22 productivity challenge of if I do a lot of good things this morning or I have a good morning, it
229. 00:19:28 kind of licenses me to goof off on YouTube in the afternoon. And she even takes that
230. 00:19:34 the step further where if I have time tomorrow to accomplish something that I don't want to do today
231. 00:19:41 or I just think I can do tomorrow, I'm going to be able to write 100 pages tomorrow.
232. 00:19:48 Absolutely no way is that going to happen. But say I'm going to write 100 pages tomorrow,
233. 00:19:53 well, that means that I can skip the 20 that I'm going to write today. So just because I know
234. 00:19:58 that I have that time tomorrow, well, then when tomorrow comes, of course, I don't have the strength
235. 00:20:03 to do that because I haven't been working myself hard enough to build up the endurance and the
236. 00:20:07 strength to do that. So I'm not going to write the 100 tomorrow, I might get 30, but it's like,
237. 00:20:11 okay, I'll do 120 tomorrow. You see, you see how this goes, you end up just continually building
238. 00:20:18 this whole licensing process of is if I have time in the future, and I don't want to do it now,
239. 00:20:24 well, that gives me permission to skip it now. And now we're back down that procrastination path.
240. 00:20:31 Yep. And this is, this is in line with the big thing that I liked about this book was
241. 00:20:38 understanding how this stuff all works. So she explains in that section of the book that there's
242. 00:20:44 really two different selves who are at constant odds. There's the self that wants to sit down and
243. 00:20:51 write, you know, in your example, because that they know that that's what's going to help them
244. 00:20:55 achieve their long term goals is going to make them productive, it's going to provide all these
245. 00:20:59 benefits. But then there's the other self, which just wants to veg out and watch TV or not be
246. 00:21:05 productive in any way, shape or form. So recognizing that those two things are always battling against
247. 00:21:11 each other is important because just like you said, the moral licensing, we take one step forward,
248. 00:21:18 and then we feel like, okay, we can now take two steps back. And that's why the dieting stuff
249. 00:21:23 doesn't work. You know, because you're like, Oh, well, I ate, I ate well for this one meal. So,
250. 00:21:28 for lunch, maybe I had a salad. So for dinner, I'm going to make up for it quote unquote,
251. 00:21:34 by getting the biggest steak I can and having chocolate cake for dessert. And you completely
252. 00:21:39 undo all of the forward progress that you made previously. And this concept, she called it
253. 00:21:47 goal liberation, I believe. So it's basically we've been working on this one thing. And so that
254. 00:21:54 progress that we made can actually cause us to abandon our goal by granting permission for the
255. 00:22:02 other self to have their way. And usually it's it's come back, it comes back in multiples where you
256. 00:22:08 take like it's a one step forward, and then you end up taking two steps back when you let that,
257. 00:22:12 that happen. So the cool takeaway I got from that was that you can always push through,
258. 00:22:22 just like she used the analogy of like runners, they will hit, they will hit a wall. And if you're
259. 00:22:28 a really good runner, she talks about how you know that wall is going to come, but you know,
260. 00:22:33 that's not the actual wall, you know that you can push through that. Just by recognizing that
261. 00:22:38 your body is telling you this, this is just your body is telling you these signals, it's telling
262. 00:22:43 you this message, but it's not true. And recognizing it being able to push through that the same thing
263. 00:22:48 can be done with willpower. Because I know in the past, like I've, I've encountered that
264. 00:22:52 where it's like, Oh, I just, I can't deal with this anymore. Yes, you can deal with it. You need to
265. 00:22:57 recognize that you feel like you've come to the end of yourself, but there's actually a glass
266. 00:23:03 ceiling there that you can break through and you do have more in the tank. And I've seen all
267. 00:23:08 ready a couple times where I recognize that and be like, Oh, no, you got this, you know, you push
268. 00:23:12 through and you you tackle that thing. But I see that paying huge dividends in my own life.
269. 00:23:20 Yeah, I was looking up because she, she talks about how fatigue really shouldn't be considered a
270. 00:23:32 physical event, but she refers to it as an emotion or a sensation. Right. I thought that, I mean,
271. 00:23:39 that caught me off guard a little bit. Because I've always thought of fatigue as, because I'm a runner
272. 00:23:45 from time to time, more of a fair weather runner. And whenever I do that, I tend to sense that fatigue
273. 00:23:53 point. And like you're saying, you can break through that, but I never really thought about
274. 00:23:58 that fatigue isn't necessarily a real physical thing. Essentially, what's going on is that your
275. 00:24:04 mind is projecting forward and saying, okay, if you keep up this pace, we're eventually going
276. 00:24:10 to wear out. But the thing is that your brain wants to get to that point way before your body
277. 00:24:17 actually will give out. So you end up getting that sensation, that emotion of fatigue well
278. 00:24:25 before your body actually will give up. And she's saying that self control is the same. We get this
279. 00:24:33 sense that we just can't keep going. We can't keep resisting. We can't keep on task,
280. 00:24:40 because we're going to wear out, but you actually can. I think the examples she gave was if you're
281. 00:24:46 resisting a chocolate bar, and if you are about ready to give in, you've used up all of your
282. 00:24:53 self control to prevent yourself from eating that chocolate bar. And then she steps in and says,
283. 00:24:58 for a hundred bucks, I'll give you a hundred bucks if you don't eat that. Well, all of a sudden,
284. 00:25:02 you've got a lot more self control all of a sudden, it just immediately shows up at that point.
285. 00:25:07 And it's just that process of you can dig deep, you can find that extra self control if you're
286. 00:25:15 willing to search for it and you're willing to just realize that, yeah, I'm getting tired of this,
287. 00:25:21 and I just can't keep going. But yes, yes, you can.
288. 00:25:24 Yep, absolutely. And there was another thing that I thought was really interesting, kind of in that
289. 00:25:35 same vein is the what the heck effect. Where if you don't follow through with stuff, if you give in,
290. 00:25:47 that indulgence will lead to regret or guilt, whatever you want to label it. And that's actually
291. 00:25:52 going to lead you to greater indulgence. So it's like, once you slip up, and once you fall off the
292. 00:25:59 path, even a little bit, you're at a very precarious point, because you could very easily
293. 00:26:05 continue to fall down that hill if you don't catch what's going on. And I can totally see myself
294. 00:26:11 doing that, especially with food. I don't know why. But when I don't eat well, the tendency, and she
295. 00:26:18 says this in the book, is to just keep eating. And it's like, if you sit down and think about it,
296. 00:26:22 why am I, why am I eating this? You know, I had a whole pizza, I am sandwich, like a bag of potato
297. 00:26:29 chips. Why am I eating this apple pie? But it's like a vicious shame spiral, and you just can't,
298. 00:26:35 you can't get out of it. It's like, Oh, well, the day's gone anyways. Like, I'm so far gone now,
299. 00:26:39 I may as well just keep going. Yeah, it's hilarious. Now did you get, I think that's kind of like the
300. 00:26:46 dopamine piece that she got into. Maybe it's just me, like, but I've always thought of
301. 00:26:53 dopamine as the actual reward in your brain. So you, you go pick up that chocolate bar and as
302. 00:27:02 soon as you eat it, you know, you eat that slice of apple pie, and then that's what gives you that
303. 00:27:07 dopamine shot in your mind. And that's the way I've always thought of it. And she completely
304. 00:27:13 contradicted that in the book. And maybe that's just my misperception in the past. But essentially,
305. 00:27:20 what she was getting at with the dopamine piece was that that is, it's not the reward itself. It's
306. 00:27:28 the expectation of a reward. So it's that desire for something. So your mind is given that dopamine
307. 00:27:37 whenever you're expecting the apple pie, so it makes you want it. And it's that process of,
308. 00:27:45 I want it and it will continue to pound at you until you give in. But once you give in,
309. 00:27:51 that wanting piece is gone, it stops pushing that desire. So once you give into it, it's past that.
310. 00:27:57 And then your brain is no longer excited about it. And it's like, okay, well, what, why did I just
311. 00:28:03 do that? I don't know. It doesn't feel near like what I thought it was going to. So you end up with
312. 00:28:09 that expectation of something that's going to bring you that joy or that reward. And then it just
313. 00:28:14 completely falls short. Yeah. And I thought it was really interesting where she talked about the
314. 00:28:20 different brain chemicals. And I don't know exactly what any of these do. But dopamine is the thing
315. 00:28:26 that people get addicted on, but it always leaves them wanting more. So what did she say? She says,
316. 00:28:35 dopamine hit promises us that we're going to feel better, but it always lets us down. And so
317. 00:28:40 dopamine, I believe is the pleasure chemical in the brain. But that's different than like serotonin
318. 00:28:49 or oxytocin, where like dopamine is almost like an artificial substitute. Like serotonin, I believe,
319. 00:28:57 and again, I'm going to probably mess up the science here, but serotonin, I believe, is more
320. 00:29:03 like the happiness chemical. So you could say pleasure happiness, they're kind of related, but
321. 00:29:08 pleasure is just like what feels good right now, whereas I view happiness as more long term good.
322. 00:29:14 And so she talks about like effective stress relievers are not the ones that release the
323. 00:29:19 dopamine. Those are the ones like the rats in the story that got addicted to the thing that was
324. 00:29:24 actually hurting them. Right. But it's so it's it's not the way that you feel when you do these
325. 00:29:30 stress relievers, it's more so the long term results. And that can be a little bit tricky,
326. 00:29:35 because we can't sometimes see the long term results. But you can kind of tell like the rats in the
327. 00:29:40 in the story, we're always looking for that next dopamine hit. It's like the Pavlovian dog response.
328. 00:29:45 Whereas the serotonin just translates into better mental well-being, better, you know,
329. 00:29:54 mental adjustment, like a general general, generally feeling more happy, more satisfied. Like, I think
330. 00:30:02 if you were to actually sit down and say, how am I really feeling right now, you would be able to
331. 00:30:08 articulate the difference between, you know, my dopamine is wearing off and I got to figure out
332. 00:30:13 where the next one's coming from. And yeah, yeah, I'm feeling very satisfied right now. You know
333. 00:30:18 what? No matter what happens, I'm good. So that was a really big thing for me. And then,
334. 00:30:24 Yeah, and she she did correlate that with technology today, which I was really glad she did that,
335. 00:30:32 because I kept wondering as she was going through this potential for reward delivery mechanism,
336. 00:30:39 I really feel like so much of the the apps out there are really designed to do that specific thing,
337. 00:30:47 where you're expecting it gives you that expectation of a notification or someone liked it. I mean,
338. 00:30:57 how many teens get addicted to seeing how many likes are on their Instagram photos? I mean,
339. 00:31:02 you see all these different addictions that come from that. And it's not so much that
340. 00:31:07 the actual like on say, take that example, a like on Instagram, the like itself isn't the thing
341. 00:31:15 that's giving you the pleasure. It's the expectation that there might be one that's giving you that.
342. 00:31:22 And whenever these apps are built to play off of that, they really become that addiction. It
343. 00:31:29 literally is an addiction to expecting something different. You become that rat who has the dopamine
344. 00:31:35 trigger right in your pocket all the time to try to give you that desire all the time. And you just
345. 00:31:40 can't put it down at that point. And you really have to to break it, break that cycle of just realizing,
346. 00:31:48 and this is the part that I really enjoyed about this book, Mike, is that she doesn't just give you
347. 00:31:53 these studies and give you the the issues. She actually does give you the tips and tricks on how
348. 00:31:58 to overcome them and how to break the cycles and the difficulties that come with this. Yeah. And in
349. 00:32:03 that particular case, it's just a noticing idea, the mindfulness, like you're saying the meditation
350. 00:32:12 and the mindfulness process of how do I focus or in this case, how do I just realize that I'm not
351. 00:32:19 focusing? And just realizing that with take the phone example with that, I have to realize that,
352. 00:32:27 yes, I'm expecting something new. And because I'm expecting something new, when it does come,
353. 00:32:34 when that like does happen, how do I feel at that point? You start to notice how you feel about it.
354. 00:32:42 And slowing it down and saying, okay, well, now that it came through, now that that reward is here,
355. 00:32:47 what's my expectation? What what comes next? Am I just looking for the next one? Am I hoping for
356. 00:32:54 the next one? If that's all there is, then what is the point of this circle? Right. And why am I
357. 00:33:00 doing this? Is there something bigger that I'm supposed to be looking forward to? Because it's
358. 00:33:05 something that small and mundane really doesn't make a lot of sense. Yeah. And that one kind of
359. 00:33:10 falls squarely in the domain of the I want willpower. But another similar strategy that she talks about
360. 00:33:19 at the end regarding the I won't willpower is to surf the urge, she calls it, which I thought was a
361. 00:33:26 really cool strategy where you're you're being tempted to do something that you've declared,
362. 00:33:34 I don't want to do this thing anymore. And so the process that she outlines is to recognize that
363. 00:33:41 the temptation is there and accept the thought or the feeling that it's generating without arguing
364. 00:33:49 with it, which is completely counterintuitive to just about everybody that I've heard prior to
365. 00:33:55 this teaching on this stuff. Yep. You know, she uses the example of don't think about white polar
366. 00:34:01 bears. And then that's the only thing you can think on. I was telling my wife about that. And she
367. 00:34:07 she was like, I don't ever want to think about white bears ever again. Right. It's totally true,
368. 00:34:13 though. I've heard it said in in golf, the illustration of this principle would be,
369. 00:34:18 you have to focus on where you want to hit the ball as opposed to where you don't want to hit the
370. 00:34:24 ball. So if you're thinking don't hit it in the water, don't hit it in the water, your brain can't
371. 00:34:28 discern do or don't. And so it's focusing on the water. So most of the time, in that case,
372. 00:34:35 your ball will go into the water if that's your focal point. So I really liked that strategy that
373. 00:34:43 she presented because I think that's a much more effective way to battle those things. So number
374. 00:34:47 one, recognize a temptation. Number two, accept the thought or feeling without arguing. Number three,
375. 00:34:53 this is the key part. And the thing that I am going to apply to my own life is to step back and
376. 00:34:58 realize that you can control whether you act on those feelings and act on that temptation. And then
377. 00:35:06 fourth, remember your goal. So the why, for example, which is relating to food, because she used that
378. 00:35:14 example a lot. When you say, Oh, I've been good today, I'm going to go ahead and have that piece
379. 00:35:19 of chocolate cake. It's because you've forgotten your why you've forgotten your goal. If you always
380. 00:35:25 have that goal in front of you, it's a lot easier to say no, because you can more clearly see how
381. 00:35:30 eating that chocolate cake is not going to help you reach your weight goal or fit into your
382. 00:35:34 pair of pants that you want to fit into or whatever. So having that in front of you as much as possible
383. 00:35:41 is really key when you're dealing with the I won't brand of willpower.
384. 00:35:48 Yeah, I think this is one of the reasons that I'm so bent on doing reviews all the time,
385. 00:35:52 is I struggle a lot with making sure that there are tasks and the things I'm doing each day or
386. 00:35:59 the right ones. We were just talking about that last time on the GTD show. And whenever I sit down
387. 00:36:07 to figure out what it is I'm going to do for the day or what projects am I going to do that day,
388. 00:36:13 a lot of times I have to look at my goal for the week or the month or the upcoming quarter.
389. 00:36:19 I really have to keep those in mind literally every day, because otherwise I'm just,
390. 00:36:24 I end up doing the one that looks interesting that day. And like she's getting at you end up
391. 00:36:31 off-base, off-track, and you're doing things that you really shouldn't be or have chosen not to do.
392. 00:36:39 Then you end up derailing so many of your own intentions at the end of the day that you end up
393. 00:36:46 in this place where you're continuing these cycles and you're continuing to put things off or you're
394. 00:36:52 now gaining weight instead of losing weight even though you're on a diet and
395. 00:36:55 you end up feeling terrible about yourself. And that's the beauty here is you, there are things
396. 00:37:03 that you can do to overcome that. And one of these, because one of these is the chapters that she
397. 00:37:09 goes through, and it's intended that you read one of these chapters and then take a week and try
398. 00:37:13 to notice them. Obviously we didn't do that. But just in the short amount of time that I've spent
399. 00:37:19 with this, one of them was how these different challenges, these I will, I won't, or I want
400. 00:37:27 challenges, they're contagious. I thought that was really interesting. It gives a lot of credence to
401. 00:37:33 the phrase of choose your friends wisely. Because so many of the things that we see and do every day,
402. 00:37:44 the people that we hang out with, you literally do mirror the things that they're doing. So if you're,
403. 00:37:49 take for example, if you're going out to eat, let's go to a restaurant and someone there orders
404. 00:37:55 chocolate cake. Just because they ordered chocolate cake might lead you to ordering something similar,
405. 00:38:02 may not be as bad as that, but it would be more than you would normally do on your own. And she was
406. 00:38:08 showing a lot of these studies that show how like obesity and fitness and whether it's positive or
407. 00:38:15 negative, it didn't matter. But it would literally spread like an epidemic where it would just spread
408. 00:38:21 out through a network of people, just from who they associated with. And the more I thought about that
409. 00:38:27 and started to pay attention, just like yep, the more times that I've seen people hang out around
410. 00:38:31 other folks that go to the gym, then their friends start to go to the gym. Or if someone
411. 00:38:37 starts gaining weight, it seems like their friends tend to do the same. But I had never,
412. 00:38:42 never really thought about it a whole lot. But yeah, it really does have a lot of,
413. 00:38:46 and she goes through the science and the details of how that actually works in your brain and how
414. 00:38:52 that operates from the chemical standpoint. But I thought it was kind of interesting that
415. 00:38:57 you can catch just like a sickness, if you will, you can catch some of these challenges.
416. 00:39:03 Yeah, she talks about how you can catch willpower weakness is how she termed it from other people.
417. 00:39:10 But she also mentioned this phenomenon called a goal contagion, which is the same sort of effect
418. 00:39:17 where she said that it's surprisingly easy for you to catch someone else's goals for yourself.
419. 00:39:24 That I thought was really powerful and probably explains a lot of stuff that people do, especially
420. 00:39:31 in regards to email. You know, you were talking earlier about how you consolidated inboxes and
421. 00:39:36 you've got 300 messages you got to get through. Yeah, one of the things we talk about regards to
422. 00:39:40 email or radiation efficiency all the time is it's somebody else's demands and ideas for how you
423. 00:39:47 should spend your time. So every time you go in to your email, I embrace this mindset. You know,
424. 00:39:54 it's like a warrior getting ready to go into battle. You know, you're just going to say, no,
425. 00:39:58 this is the way things are going to be. I'm not going to let the enemy advance, so to speak.
426. 00:40:04 And I think a lot of people accept other people's goals and they never stop to think about, well,
427. 00:40:11 what do I really want to get out of my life? What do I really want my life to be about? What do I
428. 00:40:18 really want my family's life to be about? And that can be really powerful, but it's really scary too
429. 00:40:25 to think that you can just absorb somebody else's goals by default if you're not being intentional
430. 00:40:32 about that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's interesting to me how many of these,
431. 00:40:36 because the recurring theme that she has throughout the book is pay attention. And
432. 00:40:43 so much of that, that's hard to do. I mean, you really have to take some time over multiple weeks
433. 00:40:52 and months of continually working at things. And obviously, I haven't spent that long with this,
434. 00:40:57 but it's just easy to see that there are so many locations in your day and in your life, and within
435. 00:41:05 your social interactions and relationships that you'll notice these things going on. That was the
436. 00:41:11 interesting thing with this is it just revealed like half the battle is knowing,
437. 00:41:16 just knowing what's going on and starting to notice that little bit can make a huge difference
438. 00:41:25 time it's said and done, because you end up noticing when these things happen, and then you can start
439. 00:41:29 to do something about it. Even in the two weeks that I've spent with this book, I've been able to
440. 00:41:34 get a lot more done, because obviously for me and likely for you, Mike, so many of the challenges
441. 00:41:39 that I deal with are staying on task and accomplishing the things that I want to do. And procrastination
442. 00:41:46 is probably one of the most difficult challenges that I deal with. I'm not an overweight person.
443. 00:41:52 I'm probably told I need to gain weight more than anything. So that's obviously not something I deal
444. 00:41:57 with. And the exercise thing I feel like I have under control. So some of the things that she's
445. 00:42:01 using as core challenges in the book, they don't really apply to me. But she does bring up the
446. 00:42:08 procrastination bit and focus for her amounts. And those are the ones that I feel like I
447. 00:42:13 fail at more than anything. And it's just noticing and paying attention to what are my triggers.
448. 00:42:22 Why did I do that? Why am I putting it? Why do I feel like I can put that off? Just being
449. 00:42:27 able to put words to it and understand it can really provide a lot of power to overcoming that.
450. 00:42:32 Yeah, she said it this way in the book. She said, "Towards the end, feel what you feel,
451. 00:42:38 but don't believe everything that you think." Yeah. So it's recognizing that your body, your mind,
452. 00:42:46 whatever is telling you one thing, but then knowing enough that that signal could be not true.
453. 00:42:55 And what she said, knowing is a big part of it. Do you remember, I think you're probably old enough
454. 00:43:03 Joe, to remember the G.I. Joe cartoons from back in the day? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm not that young.
455. 00:43:08 So at the end of the cartoons, they would always have this little two-minute thing where
456. 00:43:14 this kid's riding his bike down the sidewalk. He doesn't have his helmet on. And so the G.I.
457. 00:43:18 Joe characters would be like, "Hey, you need to wear a helmet." And they always end it with,
458. 00:43:21 "Now you know, and knowing is half the battle." So that's what I was thinking of the entire time
459. 00:43:26 I was reading this book. It was like, "Oh, yeah, now I know. Now I gotta do something with it, though."
460. 00:43:30 Yeah. Yeah. I kept thinking about because, so I'm ADHD. And one of the interesting things that
461. 00:43:40 comes with that, the psychologist that I've met with over it, has told me time and time again to
462. 00:43:46 get into meditation and mindfulness. And with him, I've kind of been, I guess, rejecting that ADHD
463. 00:43:54 label and calling it a racecar brain more than anything, just because I don't see it as a negative
464. 00:43:59 thing. So many people try to fix it and they want to do the medication thing and alter it. I get it.
465. 00:44:05 Some people need that. It's bad enough that some folks do need that. But for me, it's more of a,
466. 00:44:11 I have a ton of inputs and I love a fire hose of information. And the more that I can bring in,
467. 00:44:17 the more I tend to focus on and I float from one to the next. And the problem for me is that
468. 00:44:21 I float back and forth between topics way too fast. And for me going through the willpower instinct,
469. 00:44:30 it really gave a lot of tools for someone that's easily distracted. It's easy to find the tips
470. 00:44:37 and tricks that can help with that so that you're able to downshift a little bit and pinpoint and
471. 00:44:44 stay on task with something. And that's where a lot of her mindfulness pieces and the meditation
472. 00:44:50 pieces, noticing, paying attention, those do correlate to some of the treatment methods,
473. 00:44:56 quote unquote treatment, methods that they give for ADD and how to not be distracted, I guess.
474. 00:45:03 It did surprise me how much overlap there is with some of the things that they've been
475. 00:45:08 telling me I need to do for that side of things as well. So I did think there was a lot of interesting
476. 00:45:13 overlap. Yeah, definitely. There was a lot of stuff that I felt like I could take this and I could
477. 00:45:22 learn from this. But kind of specifically, if you want to go over to the action items now,
478. 00:45:28 I guess what I got out of this was to alter my daily routine because I'm a big believer in that
479. 00:45:38 it's not necessarily the goals that you set. I think when a lot of people set
480. 00:45:45 goals, like I'm going to be able to do this or I'm not going to do that, especially in terms of
481. 00:45:50 willpower, they approach it from the typical cascading or waterfall project method or project
482. 00:45:58 management method, where it's like, well, this is my cutoff point. And if I don't make it by that
483. 00:46:03 point, I'm going over the waterfall. But what ends up happening is you procrastinate on that,
484. 00:46:10 you have that goal for six months down the road and you're like, Oh, I got time. I don't need to
485. 00:46:14 start running now if I want to run that half marathon in September. You know, so you kick
486. 00:46:19 kicking the can down the road. So I didn't want to do that when I read this, even though there are a
487. 00:46:23 lot of opportunities I felt where I could say, okay, I'm going to apply this in this way. What I
488. 00:46:28 wanted to do is I wanted to make small adjustments to my routine or my rituals, which I would argue
489. 00:46:35 is a more effective way to produce the results is more like the agile approach to this. So like
490. 00:46:39 for the next sprint, you know, the next week, two weeks, whatever, I'm going to do this thing
491. 00:46:45 every day. And the two things for me were to start doing the meditation, like I mentioned earlier,
492. 00:46:54 on a daily basis, I really do believe that that's going to pay off big in terms of self control
493. 00:46:59 and willpower. And then the other thing is that I really want to make sure that I am being aware.
494. 00:47:08 And I want to make sure that I am journaling the right things every day. I want to make sure that
495. 00:47:14 I'm not just going through the motions. And when I get to my journaling prompts, it's just automatic,
496. 00:47:21 it's a habit. And what am I feeling right now? I want to actually force myself to pay attention
497. 00:47:25 throughout the day and recognize like what is actually happening so that I can make proper
498. 00:47:31 adjustments instead of adjusting to whatever I happen to be feeling at that particular moment,
499. 00:47:36 if that makes sense. Yeah, it does. And it's interesting because your action items are identical to mine.
500. 00:47:44 Because knowing that the meditation and mindfulness piece helps in so many ways. And I have to stop
501. 00:47:53 and think of that so much of the technology piece might be, and I have zero evidence of this mic.
502. 00:47:59 But I kind of wonder if the technology piece and the way that we operate with computers in
503. 00:48:05 general tends to drive us towards a need to slow down and learn how to develop that self-control
504. 00:48:13 and develop the willpower through the mindfulness piece. And that's one that I know for me I need
505. 00:48:19 to pick up. So like you, I'm big on the rituals morning and evening. And that's one of the steps
506. 00:48:26 I've been trying to do the last few days of picking up that meditation piece in the morning.
507. 00:48:30 I feel like that's the perfect time because it's quiet in the house and I can count on it.
508. 00:48:34 I don't have to worry about being interrupted at that time. And that's the last thing I want
509. 00:48:39 to be doing is sitting there trying to be quiet and focusing on my breath and there's kids running
510. 00:48:45 around in the house. It's just not going to work well. So that's the time that I want to do that.
511. 00:48:50 The other piece is like you're saying the journaling and I've been doing that for a while. It's pretty
512. 00:48:55 easy for me to do that any evening to just say, "Hey, how did the day go?" And I've been doing
513. 00:49:00 specifically for that. I've been doing like, what are the three positives? What are the three
514. 00:49:06 growth areas that I need to do today? But one of the things I haven't done that it seems like Kelly was
515. 00:49:13 kind of driving at it in one of the chapters was compare the things you did that day,
516. 00:49:18 the habits or the willpower challenges that you're trying to overcome, compare those to how the
517. 00:49:23 day went. So in other words, how am I working towards my goals and are the things that I did today
518. 00:49:31 in line with those? Or did I completely detract and did I completely fail? And do I need to do
519. 00:49:39 anything different tomorrow? Because one of the things that she brings up towards the end is
520. 00:49:44 just be okay with failure. You need to be okay with having a misfire here and there because
521. 00:49:51 otherwise you're going to be focusing on the negative. And then like we were talking earlier
522. 00:49:55 with the white bears, you end up focusing on the negative and then it's the only thing you can
523. 00:49:58 think about and then you're continually failing and then you end up in this binge cycle. What
524. 00:50:02 the heck? Let's just do it all and like you end up in that hit. So trying to compare what I did
525. 00:50:10 today to those goals and then being okay with missing out on those. And then I think the piece
526. 00:50:17 that we're, we've been alluding to quite a bit here is just pay attention and just take the fact
527. 00:50:22 that we understand some of the science now. I'm a big Y person. So whenever I understand why
528. 00:50:28 and how my brain operates, then it makes it a lot easier to just notice those that are going on
529. 00:50:33 and do something about it. Yep, absolutely. And that actually lines up with the other thing
530. 00:50:42 that I got out of this book was the delayed discounting. And I think it couples nicely with
531. 00:50:49 notice and pay attention because if you can keep your why in front of you, if you can keep your
532. 00:50:55 motivation in front of you, it allows you to overcome that need to or that want anyways,
533. 00:51:03 to go ahead and take action on that thing that just happens to be right in front of you. So
534. 00:51:09 this is another thing and I have to still kind of work out specifically how I'm going to apply this.
535. 00:51:14 But I want to become better at recognizing that a delayed reward is going to be better off. And the
536. 00:51:23 whole idea of behind delayed discounting is that the longer you have to wait for that reward,
537. 00:51:28 the less it actually means to you. But I want to make sure that I keep my why and my family's why
538. 00:51:36 at the forefront because I know I do this kind of stuff for a living over at Asian
539. 00:51:43 efficiency. Like I believe in the effectiveness of rituals. I teach this stuff to people. But
540. 00:51:49 keeping that in front of you can make it easy. I'm believing it's going to make it easier
541. 00:51:55 to consistently take those small actions that compound and produce the results that you want.
542. 00:52:00 So noticing and paying attention and then recognizing that I'm going to have a bias towards that
543. 00:52:06 delayed discounting and catching myself when that happens and saying no, the end goal is actually
544. 00:52:14 worth it. Just stick with it. I think that's a great way to end this. There's so many things that
545. 00:52:20 she points out and a lot of tips. I do highly recommend picking the book up and reading it just
546. 00:52:27 because it helps you understand how our brains operate. And there's just a lot of little stuff
547. 00:52:36 that adds up, I think. And unlike the science chapter in the GTD book, the science here is
548. 00:52:42 very well done. Yeah, it's awesome. This is from a literary standpoint. It's very, very different
549. 00:52:49 than the GTD book where GTD was a lot of quotes, which I love quotes. And those quotes, they tend
550. 00:52:58 to strike a chord with you and you're like, yeah, yeah, that's exactly it. But a lot of those quotes,
551. 00:53:03 David Allen wasn't writing. He was taking them from other people. Whereas I don't think I wrote
552. 00:53:11 down a single quote from this book, but I wrote down a whole bunch of ideas and principles.
553. 00:53:18 So it's very, very different in that regard. And pretty much every page, every other page,
554. 00:53:25 she's referring to some scientific study. Yeah. And I agree with you on the literary standpoint.
555. 00:53:31 She has a very, he has a good writing style, in my opinion. She's very easy to read,
556. 00:53:37 despite there being a lot of science, there's a lot of difficult scientist names to go in here.
557. 00:53:45 And obviously there's a lot of the neuroscience and chemicals and stuff that she's talking about,
558. 00:53:50 which I for one am pretty good about picking up. But I felt like this is, it's very easy to read.
559. 00:53:58 It's very simple. It's very approachable. You don't have to be a graduate student at Stanford to
560. 00:54:03 understand the way that she presents these things. Yeah. And I think that's partially because,
561. 00:54:09 I mean, it was designed as a 10 week class. I mean, that's the way that this was
562. 00:54:13 designed. And she simply took that class and the best learnings that she got from it
563. 00:54:19 and turned it into a book. So it was, you know, lay people going to her class time and time again.
564. 00:54:25 I don't know how many times she's put it on now, but she does teach this to, you know,
565. 00:54:30 everyday people. It's not like it's designed for academics and PhD students. So it's very well
566. 00:54:36 done. I really enjoyed it. I would have no issues picking up something from Kelly again in the future.
567. 00:54:41 To the point where I think I added one of those to our list, Mike. So yeah, that's, yeah,
568. 00:54:48 in the end, it's a good read and would highly recommend it.
569. 00:54:52 So out of five stars, what do you rate it?
570. 00:54:57 Oh, I suppose I should have thought about that beforehand.
571. 00:55:00 Yeah, I put you on the spot. I know, right. So going through it and the pure
572. 00:55:05 being able to comprehend how things operate because there were so many revelation points in this.
573. 00:55:12 I would put it at a five simply because it was so easily approachable. And there were a ton of
574. 00:55:20 things that were very applicable specifically to me in everyday life. So I'd put it at a five.
575. 00:55:26 Nice. I would also put it at a five. And like you said, I would recommend this to just about
576. 00:55:30 anybody. I think no matter where you are in life, you can read the first chapter and you'll be
577. 00:55:37 saying, yeah, I can see how that plays out in my own life. So she has a really good job right at
578. 00:55:41 the beginning, articulating the problem, gives you some easy wins with some different practices
579. 00:55:47 and things that can actually give you immediate gains to willpower. And then the rest of the book
580. 00:55:52 lays out a very compelling case for this is actually what's happening here. And here's some better
581. 00:55:57 long term strategies to help you build up that willpower muscle so that you have the self control
582. 00:56:02 in those situations where you actually need it. So five out of five for me as well.
583. 00:56:07 So the books we have coming up, the next one on the list is The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield.
584. 00:56:14 So that's when we're going to jump into next. We've kind of been alternating who's picking
585. 00:56:20 which book. So I'm the one that grabbed The War of Art. Mike, if you thought about the one you want to
586. 00:56:24 do after that at all? I have not. I've got several in my stack.
587. 00:56:30 Yeah, let me get back to you on that one. I've got a couple ideas, so stay tuned.
588. 00:56:38 But the next one up, we're going to do The War of Art and whatever Mike decides will be the
589. 00:56:44 next one on the list after that. So we're grateful for everybody stepping in to listen to us this
590. 00:56:49 time around and we will catch you next time.